Creating irregular shapes by dragging points

ScratchJr paint editor comes with basic drawing tools: a line, an ellipse, a rectangle and a triangle. You can, however, further modify those to create polygons and other irregular shapes!

In this post, I’ll guide you through this feature, shape by shape.
Are you ready to take your ScratchJr drawings to the next level? ? If so, please read along!

Bending the lines

To start, open up the ScratchJr paint editor and draw a short line. Next, choose the “Drag” tool (it’s the arrow icon at the top in the right column) and tap the line you just drew.
The blue dots appear and you can bend the line by dragging the dots! The line that you draw this way is perfectly smooth and nicely rounded.

Now, tap the line again… a new dot appears! You now have another dragging point to move and bend your line into the desired shape. You can repeat this of course, adding as many dragging points as you need.

Squaring a circle and drawing hearts

Now, let’s move on to circles and ellipses. It works the same way here – draw a circle, then choose the “Drag” tool and tap the shape. Move the dragging points around to form spilled blots of all sorts.

It can be an interesting challenge to draw a heart. My way of doing this was to first draw a circle and then stretch it, so that it forms a “teardrop”. Then, I copied the shape (using the “Duplicate” tool), rotated it and placed one “teardrop” shape on top of the other.

Turning rectangles and triangles into different polygons

The same trick can be applied to rectangles and triangles. This time, however, you’ll get an angular shape (and not a streamlined “blot”).

You can challenge your pupils to create pentagons, hexagons, stars, and… letter characters!
Here is my “E” character. I started with a rectangle and then added 8 dragging points co create “indentations”.